IATP 2016 Conference Interview Series, Part 1

Frank « the Crank » Seninsky interviews Bethany Evans, Executive VP of the International Association of Trampoline Parks about the 4th annual conference that took place in Nashville, Tennessee.

Frank: “Bethany, good morning!”

Bethany: “Good morning, Frank”

Frank: “Bethany Evans, Executive VP of IATP, this is probably the best trade show I’ve been to in my entire career.”

Bethany: “That is quite a compliment!”

Frank: “It is unbelievable to me how you ran this thing; you grew this association…tell me how you did it.”

Bethany: “It’s a lot of hard work and dedication coming from the members, and from our dedicated board of directors, to make this whole association come together. We started four years ago with our first trade association in Arizona, and we had maybe 20 vendors. And now, four years later, we have over 80 exhibits and over 500 attendees.”

Frank: “That’s a lot of attendees”

Bethany: “Yeah, it’s fantastic.”

Frank: “And I’ll tell ya, they’re all in the seminars, they all want to learn, they’re all excited. Just amazing, how you did this. What do you do, get them to jump up and down all day?”

Bethany: “That’s what we do! Obviously, we encourage people to jump all the time, and go to trampoline parks every day. No, we want to provide many resources and education for members. We want to keep trampoline parks and the industry safe. (We want them) to raise the bar to the next level, to keep this industry moving in the right direction.”

Frank: “How about internationally? Where are you headed in 2017?”

Bethany: “Well 2015 and 2016 were huge years, internationally, for us. We adopted a regional committee structure, allowing for committees in the U.K. and Australia. As membership continues to grow, we will continue to grow our committees in the regions that we need to add. The United Kingdom has over 45 members, which is 50% of the industry that is currently open and operating in the U.K. So, that’s pretty impressive numbers for just twelve-month’s time. We’re going to continue growing the U.K. We’re currently working on a British standard, which will be ready to go first quarter of 2017. And (we’re going to) move in the direction of creating a European standard based on the British standard, from there. So, very exciting. We’ve added our first international board member this year; Peter Brown from the United Kingdom. So we are keeping the “I” in International Association of Trampoline Parks for sure.”

Frank: Well done

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